SMASH BURGER TACO RECIPE

I’ve seen this smash burger taco recipe on TikTok and Instagram recently and they looked so good I had to give them a try. Suitably impressed, these delicious tacos were quick to make and if I didn’t throw some chips in the oven too, they would have been on my plate in a scant 15 minutes. Even my nearly 18 year old and 16 year old were impressed leaving the table with clean plates and smiles on their faces. A definite win.

I have also added here my version of a ‘Burger sauce’ but I’ve kept my ingredients to a set of ratios so you can make enough for 2 people or enough for 200 people, just keep the ratios of the same.

INGREDIENTS

For the Burger Tacos...

• 500g 5% beef mince

• 1 small white onion

• salt and pepper

• 1 packet of 8 mini flour tortillas

For the Burger sauce...

• 3 parts mayonnaise

• 2 parts tomato ketchup

• 1 part mustard (slightly less if you are using a strong mustard)

• 1 part juice from the jar of gherkins.

• Some finely chopped gherkins to taste (depending how crunchy you want the sauce to be).

To serve, you can also add fresh chopped crunchy lettuce (like Little Gem or Iceberg) and some cheese, preferably cheese that melts easily.

METHOD

To make the sauce - In a bowl, add in all of the ingredients, season with salt to taste and give the mixture a really good stir. Set to one side.

To make the tacos - Chop the onion very small and in a bowl, mix it into the beef mince really well. Season the mince with salt and pepper to taste and make sure the mixture is really well combined (I used my hands). Roll the mixture into 8 balls, each will be just bigger than a golf ball. Squash (or ‘smash’) each ball into each of the 8 tortillas so it spreads over the surface, about 0.5cm thick.

On the hob, heat a frying pan so it is really hot. Add some oil to the pan and place a tortilla on the pan with the meat side down. If you can fit two in then you can do two in a pan, but my pans were too small to do this. Press down with a spatula and hold the tortilla so that it sizzles in your pan. Once you get a nice, deep brown colour to the meat, you can flip to the other side (it probably only needs a minute on the second side). Check to see if the meat is cooked and if it is still a bit pink, then turn it back to meat side down and press down firmly again until cooked. The meat is so thin, so it only takes a couple of minutes to cook, especially when it is pressed into the hot frying pan.

Repeat this process for each tortilla. I used 2 frying pans and I kept the cooked tortillas in a dish in a warm oven until they were all cooked.

Once cooked, we filled these with lettuce, more gherkins and lashings of the burger sauce. If you want to add cheese, you can add this to the taco in the pan for it to melt.